Rakudo Star on AppVeyor

AppVeyor provides continuous testing on Windows. I wanted to try it with Perl 6 since I don’t want to ignore Windows in Learning Perl 6. I found a some configuration examples, but none of them satisfied me. I spent a bit too much time messing around with PowerShell to produce my own AppVeyor configuration.

I had my own simple requirements:

I want to use the latest Rakudo Star, like most people will for everyday work

I want the build to be fast.

Don’t build Rakudo every time

Cache whatever I can

Along the way I ran into several inadequacies in PowerShell and various other Microsoft tools. These things provide a challenge to the non-interactive programmer.

Rakudo is a bit tougher. There’s an old chocolately package (I’m figuring out how to fix that). I download the latest Rakudo, but I wasting a lot of time wondering if the installer was doing anything. That installer works in the background in another process, so Powershell doesn’t know how to wait for it to finish. All of that research made me miss Perl (of either flavor) where it’s easy to get answers to even difficult questions. Many communities can’t get answers to simple questions. But, that’s life.

After that, everything is easy and looks like the basic continuous integration testing.